On May 28th we held our first workshop for Communicators focusing on helping those creating email newsletters to connect effectively with their audience. The whole workshop was videotaped, thanks to Plain Peak's Peter and Christy Urban. You can watch the entire workshop online by clicking here:

I recently purchased an Apple iPad for my wife and kids. Even though its primary purpose now is "home use;" I can already see its potential as a business machine. Here are some things the iPad does extremely well, that I think make it a winner in a work environment:

Form factor

The iPad has an 9.7" display. With the right case, it feels almost exactly like carrying (and using) a daytimer. This is one of its key features: portability. In the past I've taken my Netbook to meetings, and have still found it awkward to carry (because of its width). But heading out the door with the iPad feels like carrying a thin book. This is why many airplane travelers prefer it to their laptops: you can hold it comfortably like a book, without having to position it on your lap or the fold-out tray.

Many of you have been asking how to improve your "confirmed open" rate, as it's shown on your Sent Mailouts reports.To increase the number of people that show up as "confirmed" when they receive the email, you could send a targeted email to all the "unconfirmed" addresses, that looks something like this:

Dear First Name,

I want to thank you for subscribing to our email newsletter. To ensure that you continue to receive our emails, please add the fromaddress@yourdomain.com email address to your address book.

If you wish, you can also click on the link below to add our vCard to your contacts.

When your subscribers add your email newsletter's "from" address to their address books, their email software should load images automatically; allowing us to track whether or not these subscribers have opened the email or not.

If you send email to business people "on-the-go," they are likely using a Blackberry to read their email. The problem is that these devices do a terrible job of displaying HTML email. Even more confusing, instead of showing the "plain text version" they opt to show a stripped down HTML version. This is how this email looks on the Blackberry Curve:

This often creates confusion, as explained by this customer:

"We have a number of key people [in our organization] who check their email on smartphones, and they say our newsletters just don't look right."

What can you do? As a sender, you have a few options:

Ask your subscribers to enable HTML email on their Blackberries: if your list of Blackberry recipients is small, contact them and direct them to this tutorial on enabling HTML email functionality on their device (works on OS version 4.5+)

Create a sub-list of Blackberry users, and send them only plain-text emails: instead of sending a regular multi-part email (with both HTML and plain text bundled together), you can send a pure, plain-text email to Blackberry users. The plain text version can contain a link to the "online version" which will allow them to see the regular HTML layout.

Have us a create a "Mobile Version" link at the top of your emails: this will allow a reader on a mobile device to click and open the newsletter in a format more suited for smaller screens.

Put your most important text at the top of the email: the Blackberry screen isn't very big. It displays all of the text at the same size, with very few characters per line. If you want to keep your reader's attention, write short sentences that get to the point quickly.

I used to work for a national charity. Each month, I would create an email newsletter. My objective was clear: "I need to inform them!" So I would compile a series of articles on what we'd done in the past month, and what we were about to do. I would also have articles on events, donation opportunities, and photo features. But the one question I wasn't asking was: who will be reading this?

"Who is my audience?" is the first question you should ask when you sit down to write a newsletter. The goal is to define their readership habits, so that you can write the content they are the most likely to read.